All these years, the NCAA selection committee has been making it up as it goes along.

No sooner had the committee handed in its bracket on Selection Sunday than somebody asked chairman Gary Walters what message members were sending this year. He decided to let everybody else in on the joke.

"Our job isn't to send messages," he added a moment later. "Our job is to try to select what we think are the 34 most worthy (at-large) teams."

Leave it to a Princeton guy - Walters is the athletic director there - to rub your nose in something that's been in plain sight forever.

Every year, committee members throw themselves a slumber party in a fancy hotel and pretend to spend so much time crunching numbers you'd think they're flossing with spread sheets. Instead, they're doing what almost everybody else in college basketball does all weekend: watch TV, look at the same information, apply their biases and experience, then haggle over who goes where.

The difference is when the committee finishes, somebody dials the CBS trailer and a producer pulls "One Shining Moment" out of the mothballs.

But just before they go, because committee members have to justify the huge room-service tab and placate the half-dozen uninvited schools and hundreds of pundits howling for their heads, they come up with a message to cover their handiwork.

Last year was supposed to herald a mid-major revolution because schools like George Mason, Air Force and Northern Iowa got in at the expense of power-conference members such as Maryland, Florida State and Cincinnati. Then-chairman Craig Littlepage said the message was that "larger schools, the larger conferences ... around the country really do have a choice of who they play nonconference."

Nothing really had changed in the criteria or the data the selection committee looked at, but the people who were looking at it did. Representatives from small schools, who spent years begging and even threatening to sue their big-time brethren to play some games, finally constituted a majority on the committee. They gave short shrift to pedigree and rewarded schools that played ambitious nonconference schedules and tough games on the road - namely themselves - and promised to keep doing so.

So what happened this year?

Despite again controlling a majority of the seats, mid-majors actually got two fewer spots, just six of the 34 at-large bids, compared with eight a year ago. Not that it made everybody happy.

"I'm in total shock," said Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim, speaking for the power-conference schools left home.

"Your body of work is not as important as they say it is, to be honest with you," Drexel coach Bruiser Flint said, speaking for the disappointed mid-majors.

Drexel played 18 games on the road, won 13 and beat Villanova, Syracuse and Creighton at their places.

"Maybe you don't go and schedule yourself like that," Flint added. "Maybe you try to get as many wins as you possibly can."

Boeheim's argument was that good or better. The Orangemen played a challenging nonconference schedule, had a winning road record and went 7-3 in their last 10. That's in addition to meeting the old standard for any power conference member to get into the NCAAs: 10 wins in the league - in his case, the Big East - and 20 overall. Florida State and Kansas State had arguments almost as compelling.

"By the criteria I know of," Boeheim huffed, "we should have been in the tournament."

Yes.

But some committee members think the best way to test readiness is to put teams in a tough tournament on a neutral floor, and Syracuse's early exit from the Big East tourney apparently cost the Orangemen plenty. That also explains why all four No. 1 seeds went to power-conference members who locked up their league tournaments Sunday. And maybe why Arkansas - by consensus, the least deserving team in the field - squeaked in.

Other committee members loved Drexel's scheduling moxie, but couldn't put a third Colonial Athletic Association school in the field, especially one that posted a 1-5 mark against the league's top two teams. And so it went throughout the afternoon, exactly the same way it always does.

The advent of "bracketology" has lent an veneer of pseudo-science to the process, and put the same tools and information used by the committee at the fingertips of anybody who wants them. But while everybody has an opinion, only the 10 members vote.

At some point in the process, usually when there are a half-dozen at-large bids left and a dozen schools with good arguments, it comes down to whether a majority of the committee likes apples or oranges. And that's the real message, the one that doesn't change year to year.

"Where you stand on the issues in large part is determined by where you sit - your own conference, your own geography, whatever institution you represent," Walters said.

That's as true about committee members as disgruntled coaches and disgusted fans. What made Walter a breath of fresh air was the grace to acknowledge as much.

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Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org